Reviewing Gerald Morris's "The Squire's Tales" Series

The Squire’s Tales series by Gerald Morris is one of my all-time favorite books. Aside from talking about the first book I read of this series, The Ballad of Sir Dinadan, however, I haven’t discussed it on my blog.

Until now!

To be fair to the reader, I thought it best to wait until I’d reread all ten of the books. Although, there was also the ulterior motive of wanting to read them again anyway, and also the bonus that I could read these VERY fast and thus make serious headway in my 150-Books-a-Year-What-Was-I-Thinking goal for 2018. And because for once I actually had all the series on hand (the previous time I read the entire series, I had to wait for the author to actually publish them, so had entire years of waiting and rereading the first installments), I binge-read them this time, which made for a roller-coaster of emotions…for reasons that will be made clear, if you aren’t already aware of how the original legends conclude.

In this series Morris has taken on the monumental task of retelling the Arthurian (and related medieval European) legends. Many other people have tried, and most fail utterly to do justice to the complexities of the plots, characters, and themes of these ancient stories. While retellings are never quite the same in tone or faithfulness to the original stories, Morris gets closer than most.

While sometimes Morris’s sarcasm mode is turned a little too high, turning profound into parody, and often being more flippant about religion than I would prefer* there are many times when the satire is well-deserved and somehow good-humored, and other times that the jokes are dispensed with altogether in order to give weight to the serious themes such as friendship, love, innocence, honor, and loss. He gets progressively more “mature”—more swear words, sensuality, rather out-of-place insinuations—as the series goes on, but this is also tempered by his brutally honest portrayal of the ramifications of adultery, racism, and hypocrisy not only on the guilty but on the innocent.

The first book, The Squire’s Tale, focuses on Terence, an orphan in his early teens, and how he becomes the squire of the Greatest Knight of the Round Table, Sir Gawain. It’s a rough retelling of the “Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady” story where Gawain is guilt-tripped into going on a quest by an extremely ugly hag, and over the course of the tale he learns to respect women and earns the title The Ladies’ Knight.

The second book, The Squire, His Knight, and His Lady, which tackles the more quintessential Gawain tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This one was a taller order to fill, in that the original poem is a masterpiece, and deals with more complex themes about honor and chivalry. A magical Green Knight barges into King Arthur’s court and dares someone to chop off his head…or else the entire Round Table will be dishonored. Gawain gets more than he bargained for when he does decapitate the Knight, when the Knight does not die but rather picks up his head, tells Gawain to meet him at a certain chapel in a year, and then informs Gawain that next time it will be his turn to be beheaded. Meanwhile, a new knight has arrived in Camelot quickly usurps Gawain’s place of popularity…the rising star of Sir Lancelot.

While Terence and Gawain continue to pop up throughout the next several books, they appear as side-characters in the tales of other protagonists. The first one is probably the best: Lynet of The Savage Damsel and the Dwarf is the plainer sister of the Lady Lyonesse, whose castle is under siege by the villainous Knight of the Red Lands. Lynet bravely (and foolishly) sneaks out one night to try to get to Camelot and bring back help, only to get lost and find herself reliant on the help of a dwarf named Roger to lead her there. Once she gets to Camelot, Lynet immediately gets a reputation for being a “Savage Damsel” because of her temper and (due to a rather silly misunderstanding)  her refusal to give her name or say exactly what castle or lady needs help. Unable to get one of the more famous knights, Lynet gets stuck with Beaumains, a kitchen boy who (like most characters in Arthurian legend) isn’t who he seems.

Parsifal’s Page follows Piers in a sort of echo of Terence’s story: a boy joining a young knight on his first quest. The difference is that where Terence supports Gawain, Piers—or, as he wants to be called Pierre—is rather critical of the naïve and somewhat uncivilized Parsifal, and although he himself has no knightly training, insists on rules and customs that he’s learned in romantic minstrel tales. Piers’ faulty education of his master backfires horribly when Parsifal is given the chance to free a cursed land of its enchantment, and fails because he’s afraid of appearing rude. This book covers one of main legends of the Holy Grail, where a man known as the Fisher King is kept alive by the Grail’s sacred powers, but he and his entire land remain eternally “wounded,” without the ability to heal.

The Ballad of Sir Dinadan is the first book of The Squire’s Tales that I discovered, and so I ended up reading the series the first time in a very muddled order: The Ballad of Sir Dinadan, The Squire, His Knight, and His Lady, The Squire’s Tale, The Savage Damsel and the Dwarf, and Parsifal’s Page. Although Dinadan is one of the more depressing of the series (it covers the tragic—and somewhat disgusting—love story of Tristram and Iseult), it’s still one of my favorites, if only because it features two of my favorite—and often-overlooked—knights of the Round Table, Sir Kai and Sir Bedivere. When the witty but unathletic Dinadan is knighted by his father (in an effort to get him to do something with his life aside from play music), the best course of action seems to be to go to Camelot. Along the way he meets an amiable but oblivious Culloch who has great aspirations to be a knight himself. But King Arthur has rules about proving oneself before being knighted, so Culloch must go off on a quest before getting Sir tacked onto the front of his name. Sir Bedivere volunteers to aid him on his quest, Sir Kai goes along with his benevolent pushover of a cousin, and Dinadan goes along because he doesn’t have anywhere better to go. Rereading it for the umpteenth time, this time was nevertheless very different because THIS time I’d actually read The Mabinogion, where Culloch’s unending (and often ridiculous) winning of the maid Olwen is recounted.

The Princess, the Crone, and the Dung-Cart Knight follows Sarah on her quest of revenge against the knight who burned her mother and an innocent Jew at the stake for witchcraft. When she witnesses Queen Guinevere and Sir Kai being kidnapped, she finds herself on a much less bloodthirsty quest of rescuing them. Along the way she’s joined by various other characters who have been introduced in previous books, including Terence, Gawain, Piers and his faery friend Ariel, as well as a mysterious crone. One of the most surprising—and best—parts of this book is Sir Lancelot. Lancelot is generally one of my least favorite characters of Arthurian legend, mostly because he is ranked as better than Gawain, but also because he’s more famous for his adultery with Guinevere than doing anything knightly. However, while Morris never shies away from those parts of Lancelot’s life, he also manages to “reboot” him into an actually heroic figure…something that will be much needed by the end of the series.

Because this series takes place over the course of two or so decades, the next generation of heroes begins to enter the scene. The Lioness and Her Knight is the story of Lynet’s daughter, Luneta, a sort of Medieval version of Jane Austen’s Emma who prides herself on being able to organize people’s lives better than they would on their own…even though she’s only sixteen. Among the orchestrations she takes upon herself is the romance between her cousin Ywain and the Lady Laudine…after Ywain kills Laudine’s husband. Because Ywain is among the least favorite of my knights, not even the appearance of a lion (ahem, lioness) and a Dinadanesque knight-turned-jester is enough to make me love this book.

By the time Lioness came out, I began to dread the inevitable end of the series. The original Arthurian legends end with the evil Sir Mordred pitting the Knights of the Round Table against each other so that pretty much everyone ends up dead…and Lancelot kills Gawain in some versions. The title The Quest for the Fair Unknown made me very nervous, as it had a sort of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country sound to it. However, it’s actually a tale of yet another orphan of mysterious background, Beaufils, who goes to Camelot after the death of his mother. His mother had told him to find his father, who was a knight…but she then neglected to tell his father’s name, or for that matter, her own name, or even his own name (“Beaufils” being just a nickname meaning “beautiful son”). Beaufils crosses paths with Mordred (!!!) but becomes the squire of Galahad, the saintly if neurotic son of Lancelot. Among other things, Fair Unknown retells the other famous Holy Grail legend, where all the knights are sent on a quest to find it and only the most pure will succeed.

Relieved as I was that Fair Unknown was a red herring, I panicked when I saw the following book’s title, The Squire’s Quest, as it seemed to bookend the series quite nicely. Once again, however, I found I was mistaken: this book does indeed return to the original protagonist, Terence, but not as a final book. It is the penultimate entry, however, which makes the choice of the Cliges story (which is similar to Tristram and Iseult with two people carrying on an affair and further complications arising from a love potion) a bit strange and anticlimactic. Morris also suddenly expands this literary world beyond England (and the Faery World) to Rome, Byzantium, Greece, and Elysium. He also expands the legendary world to include Greek mythology, as Terence goes on a quest to uncover the motivations of Mordred, a mysterious newcomer to King Arthur’s court who gives Terence the heebie-jeebies.

While it does seem a bit incongruous (not to mention anachronistic), these strange additions actually serve a purpose, particularly in the next book. In the meantime, much as the “Emperor Alexander Loves Sarah” and “Cliges” plotlines are clunky, and Gawain isn’t in it NEARLY enough, Terence is at least paired up with Dinadan, and the Squire’s Quest ends triumphantly—if temporarily.

When they said “All good things must come to an end,” they must have been referring to this book series. The Legend of the King is several shades darker in tone, with treacherous murders, insidious plots, battles with high death tolls, and general misery as almost all the characters are brought back for one final stand against Mordred and the other powers of evil. Unlike the previous books, this narrative follows several characters through separate—yet intertwined—plotlines, all heightening in urgency as the Golden Age of Chivalry is about to crumble.

In a way I think that Gerald Morris is the villain of his own novels. Seriously, he makes you love all sorts of characters—both legendary and of his own creation—and then he KILLS THEM. Abruptly. Sometimes meaninglessly. Sometimes off-screen! Never mind that this is faithful to the source material! And what happened to Connoire???

To summarize: Read this book. You will laugh, cry, root on your favorite characters, and mourn most of them. It's a truly powerful experience, for such an underrated series written for teens. It will make you want to read the original sources for yourself, and if you already happened to read them (as it was in my case), you'll appreciate these books even more.

*Which is odd considering he’s a minister…unless his flippant attitude is more directed at Catholicism, or he just had a bad experience at Divinity School and vented this on some of the hermits he caricatures in his books.